


A Study in Floral Aprons

by chrisevansisanassman



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-22
Updated: 2014-03-22
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:06:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1353478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrisevansisanassman/pseuds/chrisevansisanassman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John convinces Sherlock to bake cookies with him for a school assignment. Little does Sherlock know, the assignment doesn't exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study in Floral Aprons

**Author's Note:**

> first fic, hey hey. I tried to write this for my friend on her birthday. don't judge too harshly. betaed by wordsinmylungs (aka my lame sister)

“Please, Sherlock, I need your help,” John begged helplessly, not bothering to swallow the food in his mouth before speaking.

They sat together in the cafeteria, like always, along with Greg Lestrade and Molly Hooper, their other friends. Sherlock usually read and made idle chit-chat with everyone, while Greg copied answers from Molly’s homework and John ate. It was a good system.

“Why can’t you ask Molly to help you?” he replied detachedly, flipping a page of his book. “She’s used to helping people on their homework,” he added a little ‘obviously’ at the end, looking up slightly at Greg who was trying to read through Molly’s biology work.

John looked from her to Sherlock. “You can both help me. Trust me, I don’t want to do poorly on this. Besides, you’re always blabbing off about how important grades are in a society and economy like ours, so… you have to help me!”

“I thought your dad was a baker, John?” Molly offered from the other side of the table.

He began to glare at his friend noticeably. “Well… th-that doesn’t mean I want to ask him for help. Obviously he’s tired of baking once he gets home, I’m sure the last thing he wants is to make cookies with me.”

“I’m going to go drop off these books in my locker,” Sherlock announced, standing from the table. “I’ll be right back.”

Greg laughed, looking up from his scribbled notebook once he was out of earshot. “You’re so clearly just making up excuses for Sherlock to come over to your house to bake cookies with you. How cute, a little date?”

John knew it was just friendly mocking, but it still made him angry. “Stop doing that thing, you two.”

“What thing?” they asked, practically in unison, both grinning.

He rolled his eyes, “That thing where you act like I have a ‘crush’ on him. I don’t, alright. Stop being so childish. We’re friends. I’m not gay.”

“Alright,” Molly said, still with a smile on her face. “I mean, I wouldn’t blame you if you did, he is probably the cutest boy in the school.”

“Hey!” Greg yelled, “How can you say that when I’m right here?”

She scoffed and looked back to John. “Anyhow, do you want me to make an excuse for why I can’t come, you know, so I don’t crash your date.”

“No, no,” he replied, ignoring her use of the word ‘date’. “I might need your for back-up.”

Before she had time to question it, Sherlock had already come back. And, luckily for John, he reluctantly agreed to help him on Saturday.

**  
  
  
**

“Dammit! How am I even supposed to use this wretched machine!” Sherlock spluttered angrily, which of course made John snicker. “Oh, I’m glad this amuses you so much.”

He nodded, now laughing. “Sorry, but watching super-genius Sherlock Holmes getting stumped by a household appliance is just hilarious to me.”

“You won’t be laughing when we fail the bloody assignment,” he muttered to himself. “Can you help me with this thing, or are you you just going to watch?”

“Touchy, I see. You know, cooking is supposed to be therapeutic. You don’t seem very relaxed.”

Sherlock just rolled his eyes, continuing to struggle with the electric mixer until he finally got it to work. “Molly, can you grab some flour. This one over here is useless.”

She smiled brightly, “You two. You’re like an old, married couple.”

“The flour,” Sherlock repeated.

“Calm down, calm down. I’ll get your flour. How many cups?”

“I don’t know. The text on the recipe you printed out is too small to read. And I spilled vanilla on it.”

“Let me see it,” John mumbled, trying to grab the sheet of paper. It was rendered unreadable.

Molly, who was lazily lying on the sofa in the breakfast nook, reading a light novel, spoke up. “Can’t you just print a new one?”

“Well,” John began, biting his lip. “That sounds like a lot of work. Turning on the computer and finding the pesky file and then trying to get the printer to work--- I swear that damned thing is from the stone age,--- I really just think it’d be best to guess. I’m sure it was, like, four cups or something. Yeah, let’s try that.”

“This will taste worse than my mother’s cooking, at this point,” Sherlock grumbled. If it were anyone else he would’ve forced them to reprint the document, but he tended to have a very soft spot in his heart for John. Molly called it a crush, but what did she know.

John smiled, digging out a bag of flour from the cupboard. “She’s a lovely woman, she really is, but I can’t fight you on that one.” He was a little careless with the white powder, dropping half a cup on Sherlock’s dark shirt.

He tried to contain his laughter, but it didn’t work well. “It looks fine, really, don’t worry about it. It won’t stain or anything.”

“Guess you should’ve worn the apron, huh?” Molly mocked from the corner of the room.

“It had flowers on it and said ‘kiss the chef,’” Sherlock said pointedly.

John, who wore the matching apron that read ‘kisses for the cook’, scoffed.

Sherlock ended up putting on the ‘stupidly cliche and ridiculous-looking apron’.

“Nevertheless, I finished adding the five cups,” John mentioned, at least trying to get everything back on track.

“I thought it was four cups.”

He looked into the bowl and shrugged. “It’ll be fine, I hope.”

Sherlock ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, forgetting that they were coated in flour. John smiled at him smugly. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing,” he replied, still grinning.

 

“What’s next?”

“I’m pretty sure the recipe called for two eggs,” John answered, grabbing the carton from the fridge.

Sherlock took one and tried to open it, but he tapped it against the glass with too much force, smashing it on the outside instead. Again, John tried to stifle his laughter. “Good job, Hulk. Next time, try and be a little gentler.”

“Sorry,” he replied sarcastically. “I don’t waste my time cooking.”

“Too busy making deductions and playing with your chemistry set?”

“Very funny, Watson.”

He elbowed Sherlock in the ribs a little to get him to make room in front of the bowl. “Here, I’ll show you how.”

John put his fingers over Sherlocks’ that were holding the egg, “Just tap it against the bowl… lightly, and then put your thumbs on either side of the crack and pop it open.”

They didn’t see Molly grinning widely from the other side of the room.

“That was such a brilliant moment. To think that I, simplistic peasant John Watson, could teach you something he didn’t know. I think I might cry.”

This, as expected, received an exasperated eye roll from Sherlock. “Now we just need to add chocolate chips and then bake the cookies.”

“Oh, the fun part.” John said, grinning.

Sherlock cocked his head in confusion. “What, you like waiting around an oven all day?”

“No,” he replied after he added the chocolate chips into the mixture and stuck his finger in, grabbing a big scoop. “The fun part is eating the cookie dough.”  
He opened his mouth, about to speak, before John interrupted him. “Please don’t spout off all the ‘health risks’ of eating it raw, Sherlock. I’m a grown man, I think I can take on some pesky eggs.”

He smiled, nodding his head and replied in a sarcastic tone, “Oh yes, a grown man in a lacy, floral apron. Very manly.”

“Hey, you’re no better with all the lace and frills on yours, my friend.”

“Perhaps I should just go,” Molly offered as she got off the couch, collecting her things. “I feel like I’m intruding on your ‘totally platonic’ friendship time.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Are you still under the impression that our relationship isn’t platonic, Molly?”

“Yes, they are. It won’t be long before she starts writing weird stories about us and drawing us holding hands.” John answered.

“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

“W-wait, are you sure you’re leaving.”

She was already out the door, though, yelling a quick, “Have fun. But not too much.”

They stood in silence together in the kitchen again, yet this time it seemed a little stifling and awkward. “After all this time of telling her to drop it, she never does.”  
John shrugged, “I don’t know; it seems like she’s having a lot of fun with it. I say we just let her believe whatever gets her through the day.”

He laughed, “Yes, perhaps we should pull a prank on her. We could tell her that she was right all along or something.”

“Oh my god,” John laughed, “that’d be hilarious. She’d probably explode of happiness.”

The room settled into yet another awkward silence that was quickly interrupted by John’s mother walking into the kitchen. “Oh,” she said, “hello Sherlock. How are you today?”

Sherlock cleared his throat awkwardly, “Perfectly mediocre. You?”

She giggled as she poured herself a cup of tea. “Heavens, such a charming young boy.”

She began to sniff at the air with a foul-looking expression on her face. “God, did you burn something.”

“Shit,” John exclaimed, throwing open the oven day. “We forget to put a timer on the cookies.”

Sherlock grabbed the cookies out of the oven, which now looked too dark and generally unappealing. Using a plastic spatula, he tried to force the burnt messes to come off from tray.

“But you two were standing right next to the thing… How did you just forget about them? I mean, you had to have smelt them, right?”

“Guess we were a little busy…” John mumbled, tossing out the wasted cookies. He began to add more dough to the pan angrily, realizing that baking was a lot more work than it seemed to be worth.

John’s mother just smiled kindly, grabbed her coffee, and began to leave the kitchen. Before going back upstairs, she popped her head back into the kitchen. “Nice aprons, by the way.”

Sherlock looked down and remembered that he was wearing that lousy ‘kiss the cook’ apron. He suddenly felt very embarrassed. “Well, today has been something of a failure, don’t you think.”

John looked to him after adding the next batch into the oven, making sure to add a twelve minute timer. “Don’t worry, I think this’ll work out better this time…”

The cookies did come out looking ten times better than the last one. They were golden brown and perfectly moist. John almost dropped the tray when he took them out, but other then that, everything worked much smoother than last time.

“C’mon, let’s eat a few while we wait for the rest. I’ll get some milk, you get the mugs.”

Sherlock scoffed, “I thought these were for school?”

“Don’t worry,” he replied, “I’m sure that I won’t need all of them.

They sat down at the little breakfast nook and tried their cookies. Sherlock ended up criticizing John’s cooking-eating technique, and he retorted with a jab at his flour-covered outfit. It seemed to John that no matter what he felt for his friend, things were okay just the way they were. He was content and happy with what they were now, and that was what was important. They were too young to try and figure everything out.

“By they way,” Sherlock said, finishing his final cookie. “What class is this assignment even for?”

A wide grin broke out on John’s face, and he began chuckling tellingly. “Well, uh, you see… it’s not exactly a real assignment. I just wanted to get you in that silly apron.”

 


End file.
